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There were a number of great and informational talks about a wide variety of topics, and with the massive expansion of mobile over the last few years, there was naturally a talk on the platform—specifically about advertising on mobile.

“How to win at mobile” – Beth Kindig

Mobile is a growing industry, especially when it comes to advertising. By 2016, advertisers will spend $100 billion on mobile advertising, a giant change of 430% since 2013, and by 2019, advertising on mobile should break $200 billion yearly. But there’s a huge challenge when it comes to advertising and mobile: analytics.

Advertising started on television, and you have the Nielsen ratings to ensure that advertisers and publishers have the ability to track and measure who they are showing their ads to. The same is true for general desktop and laptop web browsing, thanks to cookies and tracking that many sites perform in order to track and measure who is viewing their content. The problem is that mobile has none of this. Because of this, it is almost impossible for advertisers and publishers to calculate Return on Investment (ROI).

Here’s the main issue with mobile, there’s very limited information needed when you sign up for an app or service, generally just a username, password, and name. This isn’t enough to track age, location, or other general metrics that typical advertisers use in order to get their target market. GRP, or Gross Rating Point, is a standard measure in advertising; it measures adverising impact. This doesn’t exist completely in mobile, because you can’t track if you’re reaching your target market. The equation is below:

GRP = % of target market reached * exposure frequency

Conversion rates are terrible on mobile, because you have to keep running ads across all inventories to hope that you are reaching your target market, and this causes ad fatigue and low conversions. In turn, because of the low conversion rates on mobile ads, publishers are dealing with lower revenues as well, making mobile more of a hassle to optimize and monetize.

There are a minimal number of companies using mobile correctly, or efficiently, and the most easily identifiable is Facebook. The reason for this is simple; as a social media platform, Facebook automatically has all the data that is accessible for traditional webpages and television. They even compound this by using multiple apps for their services, which results in even more accurate data for advertisers to use. Google is the same way, with a wide variety of applications that allow them to collect more data for use in advertising and marketing.

The goal is to reach people, not clicks. If you can advertise on places that have good, solid data, then you’ll be more effective at advertising your brand.

We spoke a bit more in depth with Beth about this at Techweek 2015, which you can find below!

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